


Sons and Fathers

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU (Comics), Young Justice
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 11:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20545406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: Dick has three conversations that needed to be had, at the end of season three. This is blatantly a "there I fixed it" fic.This is only Batlantern if you squint.





	Sons and Fathers

“A good day’s work,” was all Bruce said to him, not turning from his keyboard. He was mildly surprised to see Bruce not in the Batsuit but in casual clothes. Like, everyday human clothes, or as near as Bruce came to that, which was to say tailored Fioravanti and a cashmere turtleneck, but close enough.

“Sure,” Dick said. “A good day’s work, I guess.”

“You disagree?”

“No, I just – I’m not disagreeing. I’m glad Jeff said yes to leading the League. Glad that the League’s restrictions will probably be lifted soon. Especially glad that Luthor is getting some egg on his face.”

“And glad that you’ve ended the interplanetary trafficking of meta-human children.”

“Yeah, well, pretty sure that one wasn’t just me.”

Bruce said nothing, just continued working in silence. Probably the lack of the Batsuit was as close as he was going to come to celebration; the only indication that the war mode of the last six months had eased a little bit. Maybe Bruce could finally get some sleep, now that he wasn’t sitting at the center of a web, his fingers nudging every piece on the chessboard as he plotted the destruction of Luthor and R’as and Queen Bee and Baron DeLamb and Gretchen Goode and oh, just about every imaginable force of evil on this world and quite a few others. Dick let himself study Bruce’s face in the wash of the computer glow. 

“You’re not pleased,” Bruce said.

“I am. . . concerned.”

“Worried Jefferson might not be up to the task?”

“No. God, no, he’s. . . Jeff is the right man for the job.”

“Mm. Which job, is the question.”

“I think if the job is reminding the world that the League is a force for good, and that the League’s presence should be welcomed and trusted in every corner of the planet, then yeah, Jeff is the right man for the job.”

“Your concern is that being liked is not the League’s actual job.”

“Being liked is great. Sure as hell makes it easier for us to do our actual job.”

“Exactly.” Bruce spun his chair around. “The League can’t get to doing its real work unless it once again has the trust of the United Nations and the world’s governments, and Jefferson’s leadership is the fastest route to that. This is the only logical course, and you agreed to it. This was what we wanted.”

“Yeah, well,” Dick prevaricated. 

The corner of Bruce’s mouth twitched, like he had read what Dick was thinking. “You can’t blame Jeff for enjoying his triumph a little,” he said. 

_I can blame him for failing to notice whose triumph it was,_ Dick thought. He had known it was the right move, prodding Jeff to take over leadership of the League. He just hadn’t thought Jeff’s public remonstrance of all their work of the past year – all the painstaking, meticulous work of co-ordinating multiple covert teams and multiple overlapping covert operations around the globe – would be quite so thorough. It had been quite the impassioned speech he had given, about the end of lying and deception, about a new era of openness and honesty. It had been a public rebuke to everything Jeff called “Batman Incorporated.”

“You thought he would be a little more grateful,” Bruce said keenly. 

“I thought we would be a little less spanked,” Dick said, and Bruce gave a short laugh. 

“He did the job we needed him to do. And if it’s for the good of the League, I can take my licks. As can you, for that matter.”

“Wouldn’t have killed him to go a little easier on the paddle.”

“Maybe. But it was the smart move, for him to exert his authority a bit. You were right when you said that Jeff was the voice of moral leadership the League would respond to, but you were wrong when you said that he’s the only voice they listen to. People voted for Jeff because of your confidence in him. It was your leadership they were following today, not Jeff’s.”

Dick weighed that in silence. All those years he had thought Bruce was grooming him to succeed him as Batman; all those years he had been in an agony lest Bruce discover how much he didn’t want that. Of course that wasn’t what Bruce had been grooming him for at all. 

“Yeah,” he sighed. “The good of the League. A League that’s gonna have a hell of a time carrying out any covert ops, under Black Lightning’s leadership.”

“The League itself was never designed for that sort of operation to begin with. Smaller, more independent teams are more efficient, in the face of crisis.”

“And you think Jeff will be authorizing small team operation any time soon?”

The tunnel door of the Cave whooshed open, and Dick turned to see Green Arrow stepping through, and Green Lantern behind him, and the Flash. Dick raised his eyebrows. “What I do in Gotham is on my own time, and I’m not asking League authorization,” Bruce said.

“Hey Dick, what’s up,” Barry said, with a grin. 

“Barry. Hey Hal. Oliver, how are things? Something tells me Dinah’s not right behind you.”

“Not so much,” Ollie said ruefully. 

“Yeah, she’s too busy busting his balls for the last covert team he got involved with,” Hal said. He was reaching around to the panel on the side of the monitor table, pressing on exactly the right spot to open the small refrigerated compartment. “A six-pack of mineral water,” he said. “Well you sure do know how to celebrate, Bats.”

“Celebration can come later. The five of us – plus Robin, Oracle, Arrowette and Spoiler – are here tonight to ensure the League can continue to carry out the operations it needs to without drawing undue attention to itself.”

“A deep state,” Dick said.

“More like a Founders’ club,” Barry said. “Just to keep an eye on things, you know. That sort of thing.”

“We have. . . concerns,” Ollie said. 

Dick glanced at Hal. “And does the Lantern Corps share those concerns? Because I notice John and Guy aren’t here.”

“Like the man said, it’s a Founders’ club. Hey Bruce, would you mind putting the Batsuit back on, I’m not used to seeing you in human clothes and it’s kind of creeping me out. It’s like seeing my teacher at the grocery store or something.”

“Jefferson will need to guide the League back into the sunshine,” Bruce said, riding over Hal. “We’re here to make sure she can still operate in the shadows, that’s all. And I said the five of us, Nightwing, because I’ve been hoping we could count on your help too. But I won’t speak for you. If you’d rather step back, I think we would all understand that. You did good work the past six months, and you deserve a rest if you’re tired.”

“See, now you’re just taunting me,” Dick said, and Bruce gave another thin smile. 

“All right,” Bruce said, and with a swipe of his finger he brought up a holographic map, with several glowing hotspots. “Here’s everything we know about potential black sites where meta-teen experimentation might have taken place, and research facilities with the capacity to undertake it. The scientists who carried out those experiments have mostly gone to ground, or hopped on the nearest interplanetary rat line. Most of these sites are in countries the League won’t be able to operate in publicly.”

“Line ‘em up,” Ollie said, and Dick listened with half an ear to Bruce’s intel, most of which he already knew, since he had been the one who had gathered it. Barbara had sorted it into usable information, though, connecting the dots that had been obscure to him when he had been in the field, seeing the larger picture as she always did.

_If you’re tired_, Bruce had said, but he was the one who looked tired. Beyond exhausted, actually. He had driven himself relentlessly, and the gray shadows around his eyes, the faint lines, told their own story. In the last six months Bruce had pushed himself day and night, and Dick knew for a solid fact that Bruce hadn’t slept in his bed for at least the last two months – had just caught some sleep wherever he happened to be, hunched over a monitor or collapsed on the cot in the corner of the cave or slumped in a chair. Dick knew well enough what he was like, when he was deep in a mission like this one. Especially a mission like this one. There had been something about the meta-teen trafficking that had hit him hard, and if you knew Bruce at all, it wasn’t hard to figure out what that was. Kids were his weak spot. They should all count themselves lucky Bruce hadn’t come back from Taos with several stray metas tucked under each arm. Alfred had probably put his foot down about that one.

Dick kicked out a chair and straddled it, listening to the end of the briefing. Bruce’s eyes flicked to him only once, but he knew Bruce was watching him. _Founders’ club_, Hal had said, but there were two founders conspicuously missing. Diana wasn’t here, which wasn’t that surprising, given how uncomfortable she had been with covert operation in the last couple of months. Maybe someone who eschewed any kind of secret identity for herself couldn’t understand the need to work in the shadows. But Clark definitely understood it. Where the fuck was Clark? How much longer was Clark going to stay offworld, and when would he decide that Earth was worth the investment of his time again?

Maybe the team’s first mission could be retrieving Clark’s head from out of his Kryptonian ass.

* * *

Dick sat on the front steps of the brownstone and took a swig off his beer while he waited. A quiet end of Metropolis, and the late summer night was warm. The neighborhood might once have been sketchy, but it had been gentrified past all recognition now, and the major threat was late-night Labradoodle walkers. Dick plucked at the label on his beer and didn’t look up when he heard the step he was waiting for. 

“This better not be you recruiting me for something,” Jefferson said, easing onto the stoop beside him. Dick reached into his bag and pulled out another beer, still chilled. Jefferson knocked his beer against Dick’s, and Dick grinned.

“Nah, this is your celebration,” he said. “Congratulations, head of the Justice League.”

“My turn in the barrel I guess.”

Dick gave him a quizzical look, and Jeff laughed. “Old military joke my dad told me, you never heard it? New recruit sees a bunch of soldiers lining up to stick their johnsons in a barrel, asks his CO what that’s about. CO says oh that’s where we get head from. Recruit says, who’s in the barrel? CO tells him to shut up. Couple days later CO calls him up, says okay son climb in, it’s your turn in the barrel.”

Dick took another swig off his beer and laughed. “Yeah well, no one ever said leading the Justice League was a dream job.”

They drank in companionable silence for a while, and Jefferson’s face turned serious. “Look,” he said. “I haven’t said this yet, but I need to. I appreciate the vote of confidence today. I appreciate what you did, putting my name forward like that.”

“Might not thank me in a few months.”

“Oh, I pretty much want to kick your ass right now. But also—” he hesitated.

“Also what?”

“I also wanted to say, thank you for getting me back in the game when I was ready to give up.”

“I bet Lynn wouldn’t thank me.”

“Lynn thinks you’re the devil.”

“Your wife’s a pretty good judge of character.”

“And you know she’s not my wife.”

“I mean, I know that. Just seems to me you don’t always know that.”

Jefferson gave a snort. “Relationships are complicated things. Give it a few more years, kid.”

Dick swigged his beer in silence, swallowing his sharp retort to the _kid_. Dick hadn’t been the one who had brought Helga Jace deep into the covert team, for fuck’s sake. Jeff’s tendency to reason with his zipper was something they might have to watch out for. And as for relationships being complicated, he had been involved with Barbara, in one way or another, for almost ten years now – a ten years that had included Barbara getting shot and permanently disabled – and that was about twice as long as Jeff and Lynn had been married, so maybe Jeff could take several seats before he began inviting people to his relationship TED talk. 

“Families are complicated things,” was all Dick said in reply. 

“You and Barbara thinking about starting one of those?” Jeff said, knocking his knee against Dick’s.

Dick studied his beer. “I don’t need to start one of those,” he said. “I’m already in one of those. So listen, Barbara told me the other day, how you said something about ‘Batman Incorporated.’”

“Hey man, all I meant by that was, Bruce and I just have different ways of doing things, and I don’t want to see the League going down that road again. I don’t want to see us go to a dark place to get a job done.”

“The job did get done, and countless lives were saved. That’s worth remembering.”

“I get that,” Jeff said. “I do. And look, when I said that, I didn’t mean – I know Bruce is your mentor, that he meant a lot to you, growing up.”

Dick kept his eyes fixed on his beer. He let the rage wash over him, let his muscles go loose and relaxed as he let the anger have its way with him. He waited until its tide had ebbed, until he had breath deep down in his diaphragm again. Find your center, Bruce would say, that heavy hand on his shoulder. Do not let it master you. Those had been the hardest lessons to learn. He had been one angry kid. 

“Your dad,” Dick said. “The one who told you the barrel joke. Were you close?”

“Me and my old man? Yeah, I guess you could say we were. I mean, we had our moments. He was military, and I was really, really not. And we both had a temper. Made for some interesting times, growing up. But yeah, he was a good man. Complicated, maybe. But that’s the word of the evening, I guess.”

“Did he know you were Black Lightning?”

A long pause. Jeff stretched out his legs on the step in front of them, and studied his shoes. “No,” he said finally. “He died before I could – I dunno. There were reasons I didn’t share that part of me. Mainly I just wanted to protect him.”

“Because protecting is what we do.”

“That it is.”

“Then you should be able to understand what I’m about to tell you,” Dick said carefully. “You’re wrong when you say Bruce is a mentor who meant a lot to me when I was growing up. He’s not some guy who helped me out when I was a kid. These are not words I have said to many people in my life, but I’m saying them to you now: Bruce is my father. In every sense of the word, in every way that matters. And we’re not a corporation, we’re a family. A family as real and as complicated as yours, a family I would also die – and kill – to protect. And until you understand that we are a family, you won’t understand anything about us, or the way we operate. You won’t understand Bruce, and you sure as hell won’t understand me.”

He set his beer down on the stoop. Jeff had stopped drinking too, and was just watching him. “Don’t you ever do him like that again,” Dick said, his voice as steady as his eyes. “Not ever. You humiliated him in public, because it helped to make your point. You wanna yell at someone, you yell at me. You can ream me out all day long, every day of the week, twenty-four hours of the day, what the fuck do I care. But by God, you will show him some respect.” 

Jeff said nothing; he just watched Dick. Studied his face like he was reading a book, eyes narrowed. “There’s a certain point of view,” he said slowly, “might say he’s the last man on earth needs you to be protecting him.”

“Maybe so. But here I am.”

“Here you are.” Jeff’s eyes narrowed, and he frowned at the beer bottle resting by Dick’s foot. “Here you are, on my front step, drinking – what the hell,” he said. “Is that _my_ beer? Seriously? Did you just you break into my house and steal my own beer to offer me?”

Dick grinned. “That’s a solid maybe.”

“Because apparently breaking and entering is also what we do.”

“Hey, breaking and entering is like nine-tenths of this job and you know it, even in the new enlightened era of Jefferson Archibald Pierce.”

Jeff threw back his head and laughed. “Now I know you Bats got too much on me, if you know my middle name. You go revealing that one, that’s gonna get you tossed out of the League.”

“Nah, you’ll find better reasons than that to toss me out,” he said, and he rose, stretched, collected his bottle. “Seriously man, congratulations. This was a good day for the League. A good day for the planet.”

Jeff rose too. He extended his hand to Dick, and Dick took it. Jeff didn’t let go of his hand, put a hand on his arm. “Take care of yourself,” he said. 

“I will. And right back at you. You might wanna, you know, invest in some personal home security.”

“I see that that is the case,” he said ruefully, and Dick grinned again. He tucked his empty under his arm and set off down the street, hoodie pulled up over his head, one more nondescript guy trotting across the street toward the subway line. He gave the copulating rats at the street-corner a wide berth. The rats were like a metaphor. This might be a gentrified area of a far more cleaner, brighter city than Gotham, but it was still a city, after all, and even in Metropolis, the rats still fucked under streetlights just like they did in Gotham. 

Jefferson might not want to see it, but it was the same world they lived in, after all.

* * *

“If Bruce ever finds out you did that,” Barbara said, “he’s going to remove your asshole with a melon scoop. And then he’s going to take the melon scoop, pry open your jaw, and feed you your own asshole while repeatedly punching you in the face.”

“I dunno,” Dick said, settling his arm behind his head. “I feel like he might also set fire to me, at some point in this process.”

“He will have set fire to your asshole long before the process even started. He will be feeding you your own flaming asshole.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. So maybe let’s not tell him.”

“Oh don’t worry. I like your ass right where it is, Boy Wonder.” 

Dick smiled, and her hand slid around behind his back to caress his ass. She shifted up a bit, so her head was resting all the way on his chest, and he folded his arms around her. The moonlight – what was left of it, as the night slid toward dawn – slanted across her bed. Time to get up soon, and he hadn’t really slept. Well, learning how to be functional on an hour’s sleep was maybe the most important life skill Bruce had ever taught him.

“I think Bruce is in thicker with the Lantern Corps than I knew,” he said, and she tucked her head under his chin.

“Just because Hal was there tonight?”

“No. I mean yeah, but that’s not all. He knew where the fridge was.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“You know, the little fridge on the back side on the left console table? You can’t even see it unless you know the panel’s there. Bruce put that in back when Jason was—anyway, it was a while ago,” he said, pushing past the tight thing in his chest at the thought of Jason. 

“I thought it was always there,” Barbara whispered, and Dick shook his head. 

“You wanna know what I think, I think Bruce has been conferring with the Corps more than we know.”

“Because Hal knew where the fridge was?”

“You make me sound paranoid.”

“No, you sound like a man raised by Bruce.”

Dick fell silent at that, and after a few minutes she raised her head. “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t mean that as a bad thing. Come on, you know I’m the last person to mean that.”

“Yeah I know. I’m just. . . I dunno. Feeling protective I guess.”

She scooted up and lay on the pillow beside him. She twined her fingers in his. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know, babe.”

“There’s part of you that thinks Jeff is right. That we were wrong to bring down the Light the way we did.”

“Only a part of me. And I don’t think he was right about everything. But hey, I’m a cop’s daughter. At the end of the day, that’s how I look at the world. And you. . . are very much not a cop’s kid.”

He wanted to have some comeback for that, but he didn’t. Maybe she was right; maybe they were who Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne had raised them to be, and he would never quite understand the part of her that saw the world in the sharp black-and-white of a cop’s perspective. Not just a cop’s though. Clark had the same thing, the same tendency to see the world that way – the right choice on this side of the line, the wrong choice on the other, and a clear path between the two.

“Conner did good today,” he said. 

“That he did.”

“Gotta confess I did not see that one coming.”

“What, Conner addressing the United Nations General Assembly?”

“No, Conner being a leader. He’s really good at it. People listen to him. He thinks first, and talks last. He’s a good man.”

“He is,” she agreed.

“Part of me wonders—well.”

“What?”

“I was just gonna say, I wonder if that’s why Clark has been away.”

“So Conner can find out how to be who he really is, without Big Blue – well, Bigger and Bluer, anyway – looking over his shoulder?”

“Yeah.”

“Doesn’t sound like something he would do.”

“It doesn’t,” Dick said, but he knew who it did sound like. He would not put it past Bruce to be the one responsible for Clark’s long absences of late. Bruce might have been the one to give the nudge about letting Conner step up a bit. _My brother_, Clark had called Conner in front of all those cameras today, his arm around him. Of course it wasn’t a big brother Conner had been in such need of, all these years, but a father. Bruce had known that from the first. 

“Are Conner and M’Gann really going to get married, do you think?”

“I guess so,” he said. “If they don’t break up yet again before they get to the altar.”

She gave a small laugh. “I’ve got a c-note that says this wedding gets called off at least three times.”

“I’m sure not gonna take that bet.” They drifted in silence for a bit, and he wondered if she was asleep, she was so still. “Of course,” he said after a while, and stopped.

“Mmm?”

“No, I was just thinking. I was just gonna say, of course you and I could show them up big-time and do it before they do.”

She was as still as before. _Shit shit shit_, he thought. He should never have said it. What the fuck was he thinking? He should say something to try to fix it. Christ, what an idiot he was. And every minute ticked by that he didn’t say something made it worse. Made her silence more obvious.

“Dick,” she said at last, her voice gentle.

“Stop,” he said. “You don’t need to say it.”

“I was just going to say, is that something you actually want?”

It was his turn to be silent. He lifted her hand from where it rested on his chest, turned the palm over, kissed it, kissed her knuckles. Held her hand against his face. “You have to ask,” he murmured.

“I just mean. . . you deserve things that I can’t give you. Things you can’t have when your partner is me.”

“I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say that to me.”

“You would be an amazing dad. You deserve to be a father, to have all of that.”

“You honestly think I give a fuck about that? If we want kids, we can have kids, come on. We’ll adopt twenty-five if we want.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. He sat up abruptly. Swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat there. 

“That’s another thing I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say to me,” he said.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said quietly.

“Is that really what you think,” he said, his chest pounding. “You, and Jefferson, and everyone. Is that really what the fuck you think. That adopted kids aren’t the same as actual kids, that adopted families aren’t the same? That my whole family is just some kind of joke, just some kind of deep fake?”

“Dick, that’s not what I—”

“Fuck you,” he said, his voice as quiet as hers. He rose and began gathering his clothes. Pulled on his pants in the dark while she watched. The blood was still tight in his throat. 

“Please,” she said, when his hand was on the knob of the bedroom door. He stopped, and turned. Her face was solemn, her hair a wild tangled mane. 

“What,” he said. 

“I fucked up. I don’t think that. I said it because I was afraid.”

And because he had never heard her admit to being afraid of anything, had never even known she experienced fear like a normal person, he said, “Afraid of what?”

“Of you hating me for everything you would have to give up to be with me,” was her answer, and it was so simple and real that he knew there was a list of those things in her head, probably one she updated daily. “So what I said came out sideways. Dick. Look at me. I know whose son I’m in bed with.”

_Then you know more than I do_, he almost said. Because every time he thought of himself as Bruce’s son, he felt the stab of guilt at his erasure of John Grayson from his life. The truth was, most of the time he had a hard time remembering his father’s face. His mother was clear and sharp in his memory as if she’d just walked into the next room, and would walk back any second now. But his father. . . those memories were more shadowy. He couldn’t even remember his voice, not really. And it was hard to know what he had reconstructed from photographs, and what were actual memories. 

He came and sat on the bed beside her, and stared at his feet. There was a tentative hand on his back. “You’re still pissed,” she said.

“Hell yes I am. So this is probably a good time for me to ask this, and ask it for real. Because yeah, I’m pissed that you would say that. Pissed that you would even think it, for whatever reason. And this is a fight we’ll probably keep having, along with about a thousand other fights. But there’s no one I’d rather fight with the rest of my life than you. Will you marry me?”

He turned and looked at her then, all the anger still in his face, and the love too. She lay back down, that wild hair spread on the pillow.

“Yeah,” she said. “I will.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

He reached for her hand and held it in his, just watching her, as she watched him. “You can still storm out though,” she said. “You put your pants on and everything.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I dunno. The moment’s over now, I would just look stupid.”

“It’s my favorite view though.”

He grinned. “I forget what an ass-woman you are.”

“I’m not actually. It’s just because I’m with you. Your perfect ass has converted me to ass-worship, what can I say.”

“Okay but you are definitely saying that in the vows,” he said, and bent to kiss her. She wrapped her arms around him, and he settled back down into her, around her, enfolded by her. 

“I forgot to say I love you,” he whispered, nuzzling at her neck. 

“I feel like it was understood.”

He raised his head and squinted thoughtfully. “Okay, but you don’t think it’s a little weird, about the fridge? I think it’s weird.”

“Oh my God,” she laughed. “It’s not weird, all right? What do you care, if Bruce is conferring with Hal Jordan? Forget about the fridge. You have a one-track mind.”

“Not true. My mind is capable of several tracks at once. Allow me to demonstrate.”

She gave the throaty laugh he adored, and he rolled them over, rolled so she was on top. “That what you want, Boy Wonder?” she whispered, and he kissed at her jaw, her neck. Gripped that amazing dancer’s ass he could never get enough of. 

“It’s definitely weird,” he whispered, and she laughed again, her fingers tangling in his hair.


End file.
